SamePage

“SamePage” can help clinicians and patients to appropriately access, securely share and easily understand patients’ vital health data holistically from different healthcare settings to improve the quality, safety, efficiency and cost of patient care.

Duration

Work in progress

My role

UX designer & researcher

Location

Ann Arbor, MI

Project Introduction

As a graduate student of Stamps MDes program, I’m working with the Integrated Michigan Patient-centered Alliance on Care Transitions (I-MPACT) team (A Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan Quality Collaborative) to focus on how to use design as interventions to improve the quality of care transitions by increasing the patient & family satisfaction, and reducing the hospital readmission rate. Under this theme, I’m exploring how could I improve the efficiency of Health Information Exchange (HIE) during care transitions.

Appropriate, timely sharing of patient information allows providers to improve the quality of care and reduce the unnecessary costs of diagnostic tests, readmissions. However, as the progress of Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption and HIE development, data overwhelming is becoming a huge issue which reduces work efficiency of healthcare providers significantly. According to IBM Watson Health, each person generates one million gigabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books. Therefore, how to help providers to filter the most important and actionable data to facilitate the decision making is very critical for patients’ health and wellness.

The primary aim of this study is using co-design approach to develop a HIE tool which has the potential to help providers better understand the health condition and history of new patients who are transferred from different clinical settings. This tool can also help patients themselves to document their care journeys and navigate their care transition process in the complex healthcare system.

This is my final thesis project in the MDes program, and it is still working in progress. Currently, I’m doing an ethnographic research in the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS) and St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor. This study focuses on some specific departments in these two hospitals such as general medicine department, in-patient geriatric consultant team, Geriatric Clinic, Transitional Care Clinic (out-patient), Michigan Heart, Senior Healthcare Clinic(out-patient) and SNF to collect relevant data of the target people. In this study, there are 6 physicans, 4 nursers, 2 social workers, 1 pharmacist, 4 patients and families have got involved into this design process. And these participants also formed a co-design team which plays a very critical role in the following problem clarification, concept generation, prototyping and validation phases.

Design Process

This map illustrates all the key phases in the design process, it also integrates the information that who are the participants, what are the outputs/activities, and what kinds of methods have been used in each phase.

The design process starts from an intent of improving the quality of care transition by increasing the efficiency and accuracy of health information exchange. The first step is inquiry. The main components in this phase are interview and observation. These methods are very critical to gather information, test assumptions, seek shared purpose, and build contextual knowledge. The output of inquiry includes research findings, such as field notes, audio and video record. Based on these research findings, a systematic analysis phase is initiated, the goal of this phase is to categorize and interpret these raw information from verbal or behavioral evidence to root cause and profound insights which could be used as a guideline for the further design exploration. The methods we used for analysis phase includes data coding, affinity wall, trend mapping and insights clustering matrix, etc. Then, according to the insights, the co-design team started to ideate how to create appropriate personas, user stories, user cases and product features to develop multiple potential design solutions. During the solution generation phase, new concepts are generated as many as possible, regardless of how feasible they are. Through group voting and discussion, the team decides which idea to pursue further. When the team has come to a consensus and narrowed down to a specific design solution, we start the prototype phase, which concentrates on user flow and wireframes to build user interface mockups and make the lo-fi, hi-fi prototypes.

Project Timeline

This project is currently work in progress. According to the timeline, I'm still iterating the prototype of "SamePage" based on the feedback I collected from different members of the co-design team. At the same time, I'm also preparing for the Graduate Thesis Exhibition, which will be open to the public at the new Stamps Gallery in downtown Ann Arbor from March 10 - April 1, 2017.